In the fall of 1997, representatives (or people who knew how to send
mail as such...) of the Religious Technology Center began
attacking a Web-site
which contained descriptions of various beleifs of $cientology. I set
up a very small mirror, and shortly thereafter
drew the fire of the RTC.

The conflict between the "church" and the Internet has made Usenet
history since it was escalated on Jan 1st 1995 by a
raid on a critic (the first of many). While it's quite trendy to
make fun of the beliefs of scientologists, the conflict has been
fueled by the behaviour of the huge origanisation known as the
"church".

In 1988, a young member of the $cientology church was told by the
leader of his local org that he had to come up with the money
for a purification rundown (30.000 FFR - roughly 5.000 US$). He was
told that the purif rundown was his only change for spiritual
survival, never mind growth. He didn't have the money, and his wife
refused to cooperate in getting a loan from the bank.

In view of this, the young father of two threw himself from the
window of the bedroom of his children, in view of his wife and
kids. His name was Patrice Vic, his two children were three and eight
years old at the time. His wife immediately filed a complaint with
the police, and eight years later, sentence was passed. The leader of
the local org - J.-J. M. - was sentenced to 18 months
imprisonment and another 18 months suspended imprisonment. Various
other $cientology members were fined for fraud and similar charges.

It is a fact that, in France, the privacy of everyone is taken more seriously than the public interest of having access to accurate and complete information, including information about, ehrm, criminals. For this reason, names have been reduced to initials in the two documents above.

If you have a frame-aware browser (e.g. Mozilla, Netscape or MS
Internet Explorer), take a look in
here. I have attemted to answer each claim in the co$ "profile" of
their founder, putting the answers next to the claims. (Oh, and unless
you're on a fibre-optic net, you may want to disable automatic loading
of images - there are none in my text and too many pictures of LRH in
theirs...)

Letter from someone who doesn't even claim to be a laywer but would like to play one on the internet

My name is Robert Georgius and I am the webmaster for Sterling
Management Systems, a Glendale, California management company.
Sterling
Management Systems has been a successful consulting business for the
past
twenty five years. Like all successful businesses nowadays, SMS also
has a
website, which I administer. As the webmaster, I am responsible for
optimizing the website.

In January of 2006, the United States Patent and Trademark Office
approved our application to register "STERLING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS," as
a
service mark under registration number 3043198. I am attaching a copy
of
that registration as proof of this fact. SMS uses this service mark
extensively on its website to sell its products and services.

As part of my job, I also monitor the Internet to ensure that nobody
is illegally using Sterling's trademarks or service marks. In
conducting
one of these searches I came across a website hosted by Bluehost,
whose
customer is using our registered service mark "Sterling Management
Systems,"
in his metatags. The owner of this website is using Sterling
Management
Systems service mark, "STERLING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS," in his metatags
to
illegally lure people to his website. Our service mark can be found in
the
metatags in the following Bluehost webpages:

I am not a lawyer, but I did do some of my homework on this and
there are lots of cases where the courts said that using another's
trademark
or service mark in metatags is trademark infringement. The big one I
found
on the Internet was Brookfield Commc'n., Inc. v. W. Coast Entm't
Corp., 174
F.3d 1036, 1066 (9th Cir.1999) where the court said that using
somebody's
service mark in metatags was trademark infringement.

Again, I am not asking for the content to be removed, we just want
his use of our service mark, STERLING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS, taken out of
the
metatags.